WIRED's biggest stories, delivered to your inbox

Observation Deck: The Science Fiction We Need

Can sci-fi predict the future? Should it? In this week’s Observation Deck video, I try to think about changes in my favorite sub-genre, post-apocalyptic stories … because those stories have changed.

What used to be Mad Max knockoffs, largely, have mutated into skillful depictions of a world with a changing climate — the world of today, in other words. I’m thinking of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novels The Wind-Up Girl and Drowned Cities, and the new movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. They’re set in a time when all hope for saving the planet’s ecosystem is gone … yet the stories themselves somehow remain hopeful. How? No spoilers; click the video.